Savannah garage offers first electric car charging stations

Charles Davis charges his 2011 Chevrolet Volt at the Whitaker Street parking garage, which allows him to drive from Rincon and back, about 40 miles round trip, without buying gasoline. The city will hold a ribbon-cutting on Wednesday for the car chargers, which are the first publicly available units in Chatham County.

Lesley Conn/Savannah Morning News Richard Claar researched electric cars for more than a year before settling on a Chevrolet Volt. He can drive it from Thunderbolt to his job at Gulfstream, stop at Target and The Piggly Wiggly and have enough juice to get home gas-free.

ABOVE: With a 240-volt plug-in, this Chevrolet hatchback can recharge in four hours. A single charge gives it about a 44-mile range.

LEFT: Richard Claar researched electric cars for more than a year before settling on a Chevrolet Volt. He can drive it from Thunderbolt to his job at Gulfstream, stop at Target and Piggly Wiggly and have enough juice to get home gas-free.

The sleek black hatchback glides silently into a parking slot at the Whitaker Street garage.

Charles Davis has just driven the 18 miles from his Effingham County home without using any gasoline, and thanks to three new electric charging stations the city has installed at the garage, Davis will get back home fossil-fuel free, too.

“Now I can top it off (with electricity) at the Whitaker Street garage and make it all the way home without topping it off with gas,” he said. “If I lived in Savannah, I wouldn’t even need a gas engine.”

Davis, president of The Earth Comfort Co., is confident the city’s decision to add the stations is part of a larger, unstoppable move toward electric cars.

A year ago, when he bought his Chevrolet Volt, he went all the way to Houston to get it.

Three months ago, when Richard Claar decided a Volt was for him, he went to Vaden Chevrolet on Abercorn.

“I think in five years we’ll see more and more of these,” Claar said. “It’s perfect. I haven’t bought a drop of gas since.”

The Volt can drive 44 miles on a single charge, but it has a back-up gas generator that charges the battery when it’s low. The energy from braking also feeds into the battery. Claar says with one tank of gas and a full charge, he can get 400 miles.

The city’s Whitaker charging stations are the first publicly available stations in Chatham County, and, at least while electric cars are owned by the few, the city isn’t asking drivers to pay for the plug-in. Some electric car drivers have been plugging into outlets at the garage anyway, said Sean Brandon, the city’s director of Mobility and Parking Services, but it also would be more costly to connect a payment device at this point.

The city paid $4,700 for the three stations and is looking at a few options for requiring payment down the road.

“It’s part of the experiment,” Brandon said. “It’s an opportunity to try it out, see what works and be ready should demand increase.”

With gas prices jumping dramatically to almost $4 a gallon as a national average earlier in the year, electric cars such as the Volt and the Nissan Leaf are getting a second consideration from car buyers, which helped push first-quarter sales for hybrids and electrics to a combined 117,182, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News.

Consumers bought a record 52,000 gas-electric hybrids and all-electric cars in March, according to the Associated Press on Monday, up from 34,000 during the same month last year.

The Volt debuted last year, and since then eight have been sold in the Savannah/Beaufort area. At the Chevy lot, sales consultant Rufus Arkwright is seeing more interest customers.

“Especially now with gas prices rising,” he said. “Folks want to know is there an alternative.”

Chevy estimates the cost to charge a Volt is about $1.50 a day.

Davis and Claar have a solution to that, too. Both men have installed solar panels at their homes. They have power to run their homes, charge their cars and sell their excess back to Georgia Power.

Davis says he can fully charge his car for 12 cents. Claar and his wife, Kathy, are happy to show their latest power bill, which totals $1.95.

Buying an electric is more expensive on the front end. A 2011 Leaf hatchback is available at Vaden Nissan for $33,800, according to the dealership’s website, and a 2012 Volt starts at $41,000. Federal tax credits of $7,500 are available.

Arkwright clearly has interest in anything that supports electric car sales, but he also took a wider view of the city’s initiative.

“Kudos to the city,” he said. “They’re doing everything they can to keep us green. That will help tremendously.”

The charging stations help in another way, too. Electric car users access websites such as carstations.com to find plug-ins. Savannah officials have now put the city on a whole new map, which they hope will be further enticement for visitors.

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Too many people in the zeal to avoid costly gas spend too much on a car that gets the best MPG or like the person in this story no gas at all. It's cheaper to keep driving that gas guzzler than fork out sixty thousand for a car that does not use much gas. Do the math before jumping into a economical to drive but uneconmical to buy vehicle. If you think you are avoiding green house gasses with a 'green' car, you aren't because Georgia Power burns green house pollutiong coal to generate that electricity or worse yet uses nuclear power